Where Snow Falls Every Few Pages

In the fourth grade, I wrote a poem about infinity and showed it to my cousin, who then showed it to my other cousins. They marveled at this thing I had made; they thought it was so cool. I decided then that I’d be a poet. I could make something others admired and, in turn, be admired. This must have seemed infinitely better than my parents’ factory jobs. At the time, the poems that influenced me were in anthologies I found in the school library, which likely included Emily Dickinson, based on my memory of the cadences of that first poem.

Later, I read John Keats and William Butler Yeats, thanks to The Smiths, who mentioned them in their lyrics. And in a church basement class for heritage speakers—where Spanish-speaking immigrants like my parents sent their kids, fearful they’d lose their mother tongue—I began reading Federico García Lorca and Rubén Darío. But it was Frank O’Hara who cracked everything open for me as a young poet. I was 16, and one evening my eldest brother brought O’Hara home, hoping to cheer me up after I’d had an explosive fight with my mother that morning. He didn’t know much about poetry, but there was a used bookstore across the street from his first job as a graphic designer, and he liked Larry Rivers’ nude drawing of O’Hara on the cover. Inside, my brother’s inscription closes with, “Just concentrate on getting your shit together for yourself and not for others. Love, Carlos. P.S. The first poem ‘Autobiographia Literaria’ reminds me of you.”

 [O’Hara] was both self-effacing and egocentric, sensitive and funny, and his crushes and breakups were melodramatic, theatrical. He talked on the phone! He went to the movies! All the things a teen girl already understood . . .

I was thrilled by O’Hara’s voice. It was immediate, alive—it felt closer to my life than almost anything I had read before, even though the drama of the artistic and intellectual elite woven through his poems bore little resemblance to my own family drama in Paterson, N.J. Yet there was something about the proximity of my home to New York—just a bus ride away—that made O’Hara’s world seem reachable. Plus, he was both self-effacing and egocentric, sensitive and funny, and his crushes and breakups were melodramatic, theatrical. He talked on the phone! He went to the movies! All the things a teen girl already understood, even while most of the references to literature and art eluded me.

I now understand that my brother was telling me in his inscription that I was at the beginning of a book of my own making; I just had to escape the chaos that was our family home. With this self-styled poetic pedagogy and a desire to escape, I started college in 1987. College was nevertheless a 15-minute drive from the house I continued to share with my parents, and I was nowhere close to leaving. It was there, at William Paterson College, that I met David Shapiro, an art history professor, when I took a required course with him. When he mentioned in class that he was a poet and had known O’Hara, he immediately became my favorite teacher. I soon learned David seemed to know everyone, and he’d quote liberally things they had said or written during his art lectures. Some of my classmates grew weary of what they thought was needless name-dropping, but I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to know more; as with O’Hara, I wanted to exist in that rarefied realm where everyone was apparently an architect, art critic, poet, or musician. 

When David gave my art history class an assignment to go to a museum and describe an artwork, I knew I’d write about Grave Stele of Girl with Doves because he said it was one of his favorite works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had been to New York several times before but never to the Met, and that first experience of seeing a young girl etched in stone tenderly kissing one of her pet doves stayed with me for years. It wasn’t until recently, in a book about the dangers girls face, that I was able to express how the image of that girl commemorating her own death haunted me. Reading David’s poetry continued my art education, having a long-lasting effect on my own work and thinking decades later.

As with O’Hara’s poems, I found in David’s an erudition that I aspired to, that opened my Catholic, working-class existence to that of the Jewish intellectual he was and the violin prodigy he had been. I also glimpsed the Newark-born David as a boy, full of wonder and love for art, music, and architecture. Just as my brother saw me in O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria”—in which the speaker, who once played by himself and hid behind a tree if anyone was looking for him, proclaims at the end, “And here I am, the / center of all beauty! / writing these poems! / Imagine!”—the artsy and sensitive kid I had been felt a validating connection to the young David of poems such as “Friday Night Quartet.” In the poem’s third section, David’s mother describes a letter she wrote for him when he was little, to a television personality named George. The letter says, “I am five years old and a classical musician / who plays the violin / And I really prefer Bach and Beethoven // But I like the way you sing ‘Orange-colored Sky.’” George then reads the letter on the program, while David watches: “’This is a letter from / a little boy, David Shapiro, Hopson / Street, Newark,’ which got a laugh.”  The combination of the high and the low seen here defines so much of David’s poems (you might get, say, Jerry Lewis alongside Alfred North Whitehead), as does the invocation of family members. 

More than 30 years after I began to read them, [David’s] poems, like Lucy Sante says in a blurb for the New and Selected Poems (1965-2006), “have entered my bloodstream.”

I would later identify with other sections of this poem, in which David’s mother is dying, when my own mother was in her last hours, just as other poems by David have accompanied me at different times in my life. When I had a daughter, and she began entering my poems, I thought of David’s poems for and with his son, Daniel (“The Boss Poem” is a favorite). My dream writing is synonymous with David’s dream obsession. And when, here in El Paso, I long for the East Coast winters of my childhood, I only need to read David’s books, where snow falls every few pages. More than 30 years after I began to read them, his poems, like Lucy Sante says in a blurb for the New and Selected Poems (1965-2006), “have entered my bloodstream.”

After that initial class, David became something of a mentor. We’d meet in the school cafeteria (for brownies and Diet Cokes, as he’d often recall years later) or, sometimes, if we were both leaving campus at the same time, I’d give him a ride to the bus station in downtown Paterson, not far from my home. David would talk to me about Surrealism, the art historian Meyer Schapiro, or the architect John Hejduk. He introduced me to the poetry of Frank Lima, who, like David, was a second-generation New York School poet. He also spoke of his son Daniel and wife Lindsay, and I began to envision a peaceful domestic life for myself that would require a revision of the gender roles I was used to. By example, David offered a gentler and more introspective masculinity than the kind men in my life were allowed to express.

While I learned so much about art, poetry, and being a person from David, he also had a way of helping me see that my own life, my own cultural and class vocabularies, and my bilingualism were already what I needed to be a poet and that I was a person worth listening to. He began insisting that I should be a translator and would ask me, for example, my thoughts on a Spanish folk song “Eres alta y delgada,” as sung by the French singer and actress Germaine Montero, which he was particularly taken with (and would later reference in a poem). Although I was unfamiliar with Montero and only learned from David that she had performed with Lorca’s theatrical troupe and later made “Eres alta y delgada” a popular Spanish Civil War song, David was interested in my perspective. I knew Spanish, yes, but I also read Lorca and other poets of the Generation of ‘27, and my parents had lived through the Spanish Civil War. Despite the fact that he was a professor and I a student, David was able to engage with me in a way that felt reciprocal.

One time, in our cafeteria chats, I taught David the Spanish verb “evitar,” to avoid, which he’d pronounce with a uvular R, as if it were French, a language with which he was more familiar. How did this word come up? Why was I sharing it with him? It was a word my mother used often to remind me that it was best to avoid stoking my father’s anger. Certainly, I wasn’t sharing the difficulties my father’s drinking produced, how his alcoholism had reached, during my college years, the apex of its destructiveness. How this situation at home made concentrating on my classes nearly impossible. I didn’t talk about those things then. The verb stood in for something I couldn’t say. But having someone to say it to—and to have it said in return—made all the difference. 

After I graduated from college, moved out of my parents’ house, and got my first job in publishing, David and I would talk on the phone, and occasionally I’d visit him. When I began to apply for MFA programs, he had one suggestion: go to Brown, work with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, and be a translator. He continued to insist, as he had when I was an undergraduate, that I should be a translator. Over the years, as I moved to the Southwest and became more immersed in family life and academia, I saw less and less of David, though we’d email occasionally. His presence and his influence, however, never diminished. He put me on a trajectory that has defined my life and career. 

Remembering the context in which I first met David, I remind myself when I teach that I can never know what’s happening to my students outside of the classroom.

Remembering the context in which I first met David, I remind myself when I teach that I can never know what’s happening to my students outside of the classroom. The space I give them is always weighted with, intervened by, these other difficulties they experience outside of it, even when it is undetectable to me. But it is a space nonetheless, a space they wouldn’t have otherwise. And sometimes what they say in their poems, or during my office hours, has very tender flesh beneath the surface, which they are trying to protect. 

As a teacher, I am opening paths and offering skills and techniques to my students. I unwittingly may model a way of being in the world that is attractive to them, but I must also seek out and thus value the knowledge they have derived from their own life. They have rich cultural references and relationships to language that are unique to them. The other stuff can be learned. Meanwhile, I must espouse a curiosity and genuine interest in my students’ interpretations, perspectives, and opinions. I might find that a poem I’ve taught many times opens for me in a new way when a student notices something I never could have. 

The last time I saw David was on my computer screen. In those first months of the pandemic, when virtual poetry readings proliferated and everyone was still excited to participate in them, I was asked to curate and host a poetry reading for The Brooklyn Rail.  At the end of the reading, after the other three poets and I read, and I was making my closing remarks, David’s face popped onto my screen. I was unaware that he was watching, as I had my view set to “speaker” rather than “gallery,” so when his face, prompted by his voice, appeared before me, larger than life, I was overcome by the sudden presence of my old mentor. He proceeded to tell everyone in attendance how proud he was of me, how he first saw what I would become in those conversations we had over brownies and Diet Coke. My public event composure quickly crumbled, and all I could do was cover my eyes and cry an ugly cry in front of my poetry world peers. The hurt child inside so many of us has envisioned a similar scene with a parent. One in which we are finally told what we’ve needed for so long to hear. But David: I knew. In moments of self-doubt, I drew on your confidence in that rough-around-the-edges girl from Paterson. Let us follow your lesson as teachers.

Featured photo by Olga Lioncat.